


Dreamless

by tripfeldthemystic



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Alternate Universe?, Gen, Horror, References to Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-01
Updated: 2013-07-07
Packaged: 2017-12-16 19:04:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 11
Words: 17,817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/865508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tripfeldthemystic/pseuds/tripfeldthemystic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John Egbert receives a package intended for someone else.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Delivery

**Author's Note:**

> (I decided to stop nitpicking and just post it. Enjoy.)

He takes a highly unnecessary fall onto some concrete porch steps, resulting in bloody palms, bent glasses, skinned knees, dirty clothes, and traumatized daffodils. But after an ordeal that lasts way longer than it should, John Egbert finally retrieves the package.

At a glance, he’s not sure it was worth it. The box is an unpleasant brownish-gray, for one thing. Overall, it looks kind of old and abused, and not just because John tripped over it coming up the front steps; it’s seriously beat up. He would dismiss it as trash, except that there’s definitely something rattling around in there.

John nudges the front door closed behind him, and carries the package into the living room. There’s not much space on the coffee table, but he consolidates some papers and figurines before he sets the box down and leans in to inspect it.

There’s not much to analyze. It looks pretty sad among all that stark black-and-white. The address lines are barely there; the name of the intended recipient is completely gone.

John sits down on the sofa, and, curiosity getting the better of him, pries open the top flaps. There’s something swathed in layers of tissue paper down there, but a white card rests on top.

John turns it over between two fingers.

_Dear Mr. Strider,_

_It has come to my attention that –_

John immediately stops reading and drops the card back into the box.

Whatever it is, it’s gotten delivered to his house by accident. He doesn’t know any Strider, and he doesn’t feel bothered to go through someone else’s shitty mail – especially not this thing. It’s not merely gross; it kind of repels him in general, for some reason. Instead, he adjusts his glasses and squints at the side of the box, trying to make out the street address.

It’s 123 Main Street, which seems like basically the most generic fake street address ever and it’s probably just some bullshit that someone scrawled down for a prank. John’s not sure how or why said prank ended up on his doorstep, and sending a box to a random location doesn’t strike him as a very worthwhile prank, but it’s probably not a great use of time to try and parse the details here.

He glances out the window.

There’s a roar of traffic just a few blocks away, wind pulsing in the mild air, clouds keeping up a sluggish pace in the sky. The whole suburb is isolated in a bubble of tranquility. He hates that shit. It gets so old.

“Dad?” he calls.

No answer.

He calls louder, to no avail.

As his voice finishes ringing through the house, he concludes that his dad must have gone out when he wasn’t paying attention. Wouldn’t be the first time. He goes to the kitchen, seeks out a pen and a notepad, writes a couple of vague sentences about going for a walk, and leaves the sticky note on the refrigerator. (And in case his dad overlooks that one, he leaves a duplicate sticky note on the kitchen table. Can’t be too careful with parents.)

The package is a little fragile, so it feels kind of weird tucking it under his arm; he supports the bottom flaps with his fingertips as best he can, tightens his shoelaces, and walks out the front door. Without tripping down the goddamn steps this time.

He must look like a huge dork walking along the street with an ancient cardboard box in his arms. It could be worse.

Birds dart between power lines and fences.  He wanders along, idly watching the house numbers, mostly letting his mind wander.

His surroundings change as the numbers go up. He doesn’t really notice, until a sense of trepidation starts to needle his stomach. The houses grow closer together, and switch out white picket fences for chain link. Somewhere, cats engage in a loud battle over someone’s trash. There’s shattered glass in the street.

Everything’s a bit too quiet, and John is suddenly very aware that he’s a short, too-skinny, nerdy-looking ninth-grader with coke-bottle glasses and bad skin. He’s the epitome of physical vulnerability. And he’s alone, and clutching a gross box, like some kind of huge chump.

His imagination runs wild. He’s 98% sure he’s not going to make it home alive, even though he has no idea what the crime rates are here, or who lives in this area, or whether or not he’s a statistically-likely target. Everything just kind of looks creepy and unfamiliar. He starts composing his obituary in his head.

He’s so wrapped up in being a wimp that he almost passes number 123 Main Street without realizing it. Then he doubles back and snaps out of it, at least partway, to look at the house.

It’s kind of ugly.

At least, he thinks so.

It’s just this blocky structure crammed into a comparatively unfriendly-seeming neighborhood, which constitutes the wrong side of the tracks here in suburbia. Pretty much no yard, just a chain-link gate and a cracked front walk on a few patches of dead grass. It’s more unappealing than threatening, but John gulps and hugs the package to his chest as he heads toward the front door.

The doorbell is one of those stupid doorbells where it’s either broken or so quiet that you can’t hear it, and it’s impossible to tell which. John tries it twice, and then knocks on the door, trying to quell the sick feeling in his stomach.

A long silence follows, and John is just about to set the package down and leave when the door opens.

It’s only cracked open, limited by a chain; something black flashes in the gap before the door slams shut and then opens all the way.

Leaning in the doorway, to John’s intense relief, is a boy who looks to be about his own age, with only a slight advantage in height and weight. His face is smattered in freckles and dominated by a large pair of aviator-style sunglasses, and sun-bleached blonde hair sweeps over his head. He studies John, who can’t decide if his gaze is sultry or apathetic. Whatever it is, the execution borders on artistic.

“Yeah?” says the boy.

John isn’t quite sure how to react to that.

“Um,” he says. He offers up the package as an explanation. “I think I ended up with your package.”

The boy’s eyes flick down to the package. He raises his eyebrows. “My package, huh? Weird.”

“Yeah. It’s got a note inside to ‘Mr. Strider.’ Maybe that’s…”

“Oh,” says the boy, promptly losing interest. “Yeah, I’ll take it. It’s probably for my Bro.”

“Okay,” John says, handing over the package; he’s somewhat bewildered, but it’s a relief to have the package out of his hands. Questions swirl in his mind, jostling for priority, but a more basic reaction kicks in and he flashes a bucktoothed grin at the stranger. “I’m John Egbert. I just live a few streets down, over in…”

He falters. For some reason he’s expected the boy to cut him off mid-sentence or shut the door in his face, but nothing happens. The boy waits, expressionless. John renews his smile.

“I don’t think I’ve seen you before,” he says. “What’s your name?”

“Dave Strider,” says the other boy. He looks like he’s biting his tongue. “Man, you look like you got freaked out walking through this part of town.”

“My house is about twenty minutes away by foot,” says John. “This isn’t even really a separate area.”

“Well, that doesn’t mean shit. You could live five minutes away and it could be totally different.” Dave runs a hand through his hair and glances over his shoulder. “Uh, my Bro’s not home or anything. You wanna come inside or whatever? If you’ve got time. I’m not doing anything.”

He doesn’t sound like he cares one way or another, but John does. He’s been bored all day.

“Sure! Should I take off my shoes?”

Dave gives him the strangest look he’s ever received in his life. “Do I _look_ like I keep a squeaky clean house?” he says. “I don’t give a shit. You could play ‘the floor is lava’ in combat boots straight out of a hike along the Bayou. I still wouldn’t give a shit. Do whatever you want, dude.”

John shrugs and follows him inside.

The house is poorly-lit and cluttered, and boxes are stacked along one wall, most of them duct-taped shut.

“Did you just move in?” John asks, surveying the organized chaos.

“Kinda. It’s just taking a long time to get everything out of these stupid boxes.” Dave adds the old box to the pile. “Did you seriously walk all the way over here just to give my Bro an unbelievably shitty package?”

“Well, yeah.” John gives him an uncertain smile. “Why wouldn’t I? It’s not mine.”

“Have you seen it? It probably got lost ages ago. God knows how it got here. You probably could have thrown it out, and no one would have known.”

Dave heads to the kitchen. John follows. “Where did you move from? You have an accent.”

“I do? Wow, that’s embarrassing. I’m Texan. Not a redneck, though.”

John can’t tell if he’s being genuine or sarcastic. “I didn’t think you were.”

He pulls a bottle of apple juice out of a rather bare-looking fridge. John flops down at the kitchen table. “How come you moved all the way up here?” he says. “Texas to Washington, that’s a pretty big change.”

Dave can’t get the top off of the bottle. He mutters curses at it. “I wanted to,” he says. “Or I did at the time. It felt like it would be right, or some stupid shit like that. I don’t even remember why I wanted to come here. It’s kinda boring.”

“Yeah, you’re probably a city kid or something,” says John.

Dave looks like he’s wringing his fingers raw on that bottle top. He gives up and glares at it. “Man. Shit’s gotta be so complicated.”

“Hey, do we go to the same school?” says John enthusiastically. “If you’re  a freshman, I could show you - ”

“Yeah, no shit we go to the same school. I live like two streets away from you. I just haven’t been in yet. If you’re in ninth grade, I’ll probably see you at least a little.”

“Yeah, I am. You’re lucky you missed the first few days of classes. That’s when they do all the boring stuff.” John takes the apple juice from Dave, removes the cap in one twist, and hands it back to him.

Dave gives the juice a distrustful stare. “I loosened it for you.”

John suspects he’s right, but he smiles cheerfully. “Maybe we’ll have classes together.”

“Yeah, that’d be pretty cool,” says Dave. “Not like I know anyone.”

For some reason, that strikes John as kind of sad, even though it stands to reason since Dave just moved in. “You know me,” he offers.

“For five whole minutes,” Dave says, taking a swig of the apple juice. John must have looked hurt, because he quickly amends, “I’ll take it, though.”

John gives him a dopey grin. “This is so cool. I don’t really know anyone at school, but now I’ll know you.”

“You don’t know me,” says Dave. “No one knows me.”

He looks like he’s intending that to be serious, but John has to stifle a laugh. “And you’re pretty cool, too. I don’t think I’ve ever been friends with a cool kid before.”

“Yeah, I’ll believe that,” says Dave. “I am pretty cool.” He pauses and gives John a suspicious look. “Wait. Are you teasing me or something?”

“No.”

“Good. Because I am the most serious of business.” To prove it, he drinks half the bottle in one go, and returns it to the refrigerator shelf. “See I just did that like I was drinking hard alcohol or some shit. But it’s apple juice. It’s ironic.” He says it like he’s trying to teach John something new.

“Yeah,” John says, still smiling. This kid’s so full of shit, but he likes him so far. “Pretty great.”

Dave wipes his sleeve across his mouth and regards John in silence for a moment. Eventually, he says, “You got anywhere to be, man?”

John’s eyes go wide. “Huh? No. I mean, I only brought the package myself because I was super bored. Why? Is your… uh, your brother not going to like that I’m here?”

Dave snorts. “Hell no. Bro’s not gonna give a shit. I don’t even know when he’s coming back, anyway. I was just wondering.”

“I don’t have anywhere to be,” John says. “I don’t really do anything on weekends.”

“So basically what you’re saying is you’re a colossal square,” says Dave.

“It’s not a big deal,” says John. “I just hang out on the internet.”

“Hey, same. It’s like we’re totally gonna be friends.” Dave leans against the kitchen counter, staring down at John through his shades. For a moment, a smile almost twitches at the corner of his mouth, but then his eyes narrow. “You know, man, you look kinda familiar. Like have I seen you around town somewhere? It feels like it.”

“Huh? Probably not. Like I said, I don’t go out too much.”

Dave furrows his eyebrows. “Weird. Could have sworn I’ve seen you before.”

He stares at John, unabashed, and John starts to feel a bit claustrophobic under that shaded gaze.

“I should probably go home,” he says uncertainly.

“You should?” says Dave. He recovers. “I mean, yeah… you should. I’m not supposed to be throwing wild parties while my bro’s out of town. You know how it is.”

John feels like he’s probably just been on the receiving end of more ironic bullshit, but he decides not to pursue it. He gives another grin and rises from the table. “I’ll see you later,” he says, and walks to the door alone because Dave is suddenly preoccupied with an ant on the tiles.

As he leaves, he passes the old box. He’s abruptly seized with a great temptation to look inside – just to peek, just to pull the tissue paper apart and see what’s hiding underneath, but something pushes him away. Maybe the threat of the mysterious Bro Strider, who although absent sounds vaguely intimidating; or maybe just the image of the package itself, ancient and faded, looking like such a mistake that it screams “you don’t want to know”. The package that somehow managed to follow the Striders from Texas to Washington.

John feels a sudden and deep sense of horror. He leaves the empty house.


	2. Learning Environment

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Don't get twitchy.

“Dave, can you take off your glasses?”

The teacher is young and brunette and she seems kind of apologetic as she looks over her lesson plan, singling out Dave Strider, who recoils slightly.

“You mean my shades?”

“Yes, your shades,” she says. “You’ll need to take them off.”

Dave rubs his knuckles together on his desk. The other students glance at him curiously; John bites his tongue. “Why?” Dave asks.

“They’re prohibited by the school dress code,” the teacher says. “You can’t wear them here. I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, but, why?” Dave says. John might be imagining the note of anxiety in his voice; it’s hidden under a challenge. “Are they dangerous?”

“The dress code doesn’t allow anything that covers your face,” the teacher says.

“What if I’m really ugly, though? Wouldn’t that disrupt the learning environment, or something?”

The teacher laughs a bit, although it seems like she’s getting nervous. A couple of the girls giggle as well, maybe because the visible parts of Dave Strider are admittedly good-looking and the idea of him being ugly is rather far-fetched. “I’m sure your appearance won’t distract anyone,” the teacher says. “You might want to review the dress code when you have free time, to make sure you don’t slip up. It’s in the handbook.”

Dave runs a finger along the arm of his shades. “So glasses are okay, but shades aren’t?”

“Glasses are transparent,” says the teacher. “And they’re generally necessary.”

John starts biting his fingernails.

“Dave, I need to teach,” she says, a hint of impatience crossing her features although she remains level. “I would let you wear them, I really would, but I have to do my job. Could you please - ”

“Sure I can’t just keep them on?” Dave says. He’s hiding his distress very well, but John is sure it’s there. He’s not sure why. “Like, I dunno, just for now?”

“I’m sorry,” the teacher repeats. “It’s policy. See me after class and I’ll go over the dress code with you, but I can’t argue about it now, okay?”

Dave bites his lip and pushes his shades up onto his forehead instead of removing them. John catches a glimpse of his eyes, garnet-red, before Dave brushes his hair down to partially obscure them again.

The lesson drags. John notices that Dave isn’t concentrating. The other boy doodles poorly-drawn faces in the margins of his notebook and fidgets too much; his normal relaxed apathy seems rather brittle. Occasionally, he brushes his fingers across his eyes, as though his face doesn’t feel right without the barrier of the sunglasses.

When the bell rings, John hangs around, intending to wait until Dave finishes talking to the teacher, but Dave waves him on. John isn’t too surprised. He heads to his next class, wondering how long it will take Dave Strider to get acclimated to this school.

The next time they see each other, Dave looks halfway between disgruntled and high-strung. Without the shades, his face is oddly readable; John feels like he’s intruding on something just by seeing him.

“So what’s the deal with the sunglasses?” John says.

“What sunglasses?”

“Come on,” John says. “No one ever reacts that way about the dress code. Do the shades mean something? Are they like a tinfoil hat? Do they shield you from - ”

“Stop being a moron,” Dave says. He touches his fingers to his exposed eyelids again. “They don’t mean shit. I just like them.”

“But when you took them off,” John persists, “you got weird. I saw you. You seemed really nervous. What’s with that?”

“I just get fidgety when I don’t have rad shades,” Dave says, his usual deadpan corrupted by a vague disgruntled overtone. “Don’t you get fidgety when you don’t look as awesome as you usually do? Rattles my standards, man.”

John supposes it’s more of his ironic bullshit, and he stops pushing the issue, although he has a feeling there’s more to it. He’s heard of agoraphobes who wear sunglasses to put a barrier between themselves and the world. Then again, some douchebag coolkids just like to wear sunglasses, even indoors at night. He’s not sure.

John doesn’t see him the rest of the day. He worries, but when he texts Dave after school, he gets brushed off, so the guy must be feeling okay.

There’s hardly any reason to keep thinking about it, but it’s on his mind, the image of those deep red eyes, in constant motion, as though afraid of seeing too much.


	3. Locked Up

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nightmares?

Someone pushes past John as though he’s not there. The impact knocks him into the lockers, and the zipper on his backpack bursts. Textbooks unbalance and spill onto the floor.

He glares at them for a moment, and then gives a heavy sigh, shrugging off his backpack and beginning to gather the scattered papers. It wasn’t anything personal, that shove, and he knows it wasn't; just someone in a hurry, like most people in the hallways. Someone who happened to be pretty big, but then, most people are bigger than John.

The spine of his algebra book has been broken in the accident. John imagines himself a paramedic, carefully sliding the injured book back into his bag, fitting the zipper teeth together as though stitching a wound. Someone hands him a sheaf of worksheets. He takes it absentmindedly, tucks it back into his backpack with surgical precision…

“You gonna look up, or do I have to wait for you to finish your weirdly spaced-out damage control?” says a voice.

John jumps and looks up guiltily, and then relaxes somewhat when he sees that it’s Dave Strider.

“Oh,” he says. “It’s you.”

Dave raises an eyebrow. “’It’s you’? Am I really worth such a blasé greeting, John? You might have noticed I’m sort of a big deal.”

“Of course I’ve noticed,” says John. “You’ve told me practically every day. Wanna give me a hand with these books?”

“Not really,” says Dave, but he crouches down and collects some stray books anyway. “Why the fuck are you taking all this shit home for the weekend, anyway?”

“I have homework,” says John. “Homework that I’m probably gonna do in school on Monday at the last minute, but still.”

“Right.” Dave watches him as he fixes the backpack zipper and seals the pockets. “You probably missed the bus to clean all that up.”

“Whatever,” says John, slinging the backpack over his shoulder and standing up. “I’ll just walk home. I do that sometimes. It’s not like it takes that much longer.”

Dave remains kneeling on the tiles, staring blankly up at John.

John tilts his head. “What?”

Dave extends a hand. “Help me up.”

“You’re god damn ridiculous.” John takes his hand and pulls him to his feet. “You and your irony bullshit. I don’t know why I deal with it.”

“That was totally unironic. I am genuinely incapable of rising from the ground on my own. I’m that much of a weak-ass white kid.” John rolls his eyes. The two of them start off together, heading for the school lobby. “Who knocked you down?” Dave asks.

“What?” says John. “No one knocked me down. They hallway was crowded and someone walked into me and my backpack broke open.”

“Sure,” says Dave. “Bet you’re totally lying. No offense, but you seem like you got beat up in middle school.”

“Nope,” says John cheerfully. “Most people just left me alone! Which was kind of lonely sometimes, but still preferable. Don’t read too much into it.”

“If you say so,” Dave says.

The reach the lobby. The afternoon light is streaming in panels through the glass doors, blinding on the tiles. John hefts his backpack on his shoulder. “Are you walking home?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh.” John contemplates for a moment. “Is your bro still away?”

“Probably,” says Dave.

“Is that legal?” John asks.

Dave snorts. “Probably not. I don’t care. It’s not a big deal either way.”

John hesitates. “Do you… wanna come home with me, for the afternoon? So you’re not stuck in your house by yourself?”

Dave gnaws on his lip but doesn’t reply. His expression is unreadable behind those sunglasses.

“It must get pretty boring over there,” John tries.

“Yeah,” says Dave.

They push through the lobby doors and head onto the sidewalk. “So do you want to?” John asks. “It’s not that far, and you’ve never even seen my house.”

“Is your house rad?”

“Uh, no, not really. But come on. I could show you my stuff.”

“Something tells me your stuff is also not rad.”

“Are you kidding? My stuff is rad as shit.” They reach the street. John pushes his glasses up on his nose. “Make up your mind.”

Dave jerks his head to the right. “Your house is this way?”

“Yeah. Just a few minutes away. No one’s home or anything, it’ll be boring otherwise.”

Dave shrugs. “Let’s go for it.”

John stares at him. “Wait, seriously?”

Dave tilts his head and gives John a look of deep reproach. “Oh my god. You just spent like five minutes pestering me to go to your house and now I say okay and you don’t believe me. Why am I even your friend?”

John grins at him. “You’re the best. It’s like five minutes from here. It basically looks exactly like all the other houses around it, so it’s a little boring, but inside it’s kinda weird, it’s mostly my dad’s fault…”

John rambles on as they walk down the street, and Dave probably doesn’t care about half the things he’s saying but he also doesn’t give any indication that he objects to the filler. John continues to run his mouth while they jaywalk across the main road and head down a side street into the cookie-cutter neighborhood; and he keeps talking, almost not thinking about what he’s saying, until he realizes that Dave isn’t walking next to him any longer.

He turns around. Dave has stopped walking, and is standing stock-still about ten feet behind him.

John pauses and looks inquisitively at the other boy. “What’s up?” he asks. “Why’d you stop?”

Dave is staring at something over John’s shoulder, and even with those shades on, John can read the apprehension in his face. “That’s a dog,” he says.

John turns around. It’s a black German shepherd, maintaining its distance on the lawn of the next house, wandering back and forth on the end of a lead. “Yeah,” John says. “What’s the problem?”

Dave mumbles something and doesn’t come any closer. John raises his hands. “I can’t hear you, dude.”

“I don’t like dogs,” Dave says, a little louder. “I’m not a fan.”

“You’re scared of dogs?” says John. Dave looks as though he’s about to protest, but John shrugs. “That’s okay. I know that dog – he’s just Tanner. He’s big and everything but he’s literally the nicest dog ever. Look.” He walks onto the grass and whistles; the dog barks, but then trots across the lawn and sits, panting, while John scratches between his pointed ears. John smiles at Dave. “He’s okay. Just walk past.”

Dave balks, his hands in his pockets, his lips a tense line.

“I’m telling you, look, he’s on a leash and everything,” John says, lifting the cord where it attaches to the dog’s collar. “I can even hold him while you walk. He won’t hurt you. He’s totally not-vicious, I promise. Tanner, go.”

The dog stands and walks obediently back up to the house’s front walk.

“You wanna try to go past?” John says.

Dave mutters something.

“Dude, I can’t hear you from over here.”

“I said I _can’t!”_ Dave yells. His tone makes John look at him again. Even from this far away he’s visibly shaking, his hands balled up, his skin even paler than usual. “I can’t, Egbert! What part of that don’t you understand?”

It’s such an abrupt departure from his usual taciturn composure that John feels a stab of alarm. He steps off the lawn. “Okay, that’s fine,” he says, wandering back toward his friend. “Don’t worry about it. Do you wanna take another route? There are a bunch of ways to get to my house.”

Dave shoves his hands back in his pockets, a flush tempering the paleness of his skin. His expression has returned to neutral, but shame radiates from him like heat. “Nah,” he mutters. “I’d rather go home.”

“That’s cool,” says John. “I’ll go with you.”

Dave doesn’t protest, but he still doesn’t seem too happy. He turns and walks away, his shoulders somewhat hunched. John follows, deeming it better to keep quiet. Something feels off – maybe Dave’s loss of cool is just such a radical shift that the air itself feels different, but John feels in the pit of his stomach that there’s something deeper going on, something wrong.

The silence doesn’t last for long. Dave looks so aloof that by the time they get back to the main road, John feels compelled to say something.

“Are you okay?” he says. “Because it’s fine if you’re not.”

“I’m good,” Dave says.

“I’ve never seen you lose it like that,” John says. “I’m sorry I pushed it. You must really hate dogs.”

“It’s not your fault,” says Dave. “Just me being a moron. Don’t be sorry.”

“You’re not a moron,” John says. “Everyone has something like that. Like a weird fear or something that doesn’t make much sense. Like, um, I hate clowns. That’s totally dumb, right?”

“Nah,” Dave says. “That’s not too special. I hate clowns too. Everyone hates clowns.”

“A lot of people are scared of dogs,” John points out.

“But most people don’t hate them for no reason or flip a shit just trying to walk past them,” Dave says.

“It’s not a big deal,” says John. “You don’t have to feel bad about it.”

“I don’t feel bad about it.”

“Really? Okay. It seems kinda like you do, but we don’t have to talk about it or anything. Maybe, if you want to go some other time, we can take streets without any dogs around.”

“It’s just big dogs,” Dave says.

“Yeah, okay, I get that.”

They walk in silence for a moment.

“Do you really hate dogs for no reason?” John says. “You never had… I dunno, a bad experience or something? I knew someone who got attacked by a Doberman once, but…”

“Nah,” Dave mutters. “I never… well, I never _really_ had anything like that happen. Just some… stupid shit, you know?”

John Egbert gives him a blank stare, and he sighs in resignation.

“Okay, whatever. I haven’t _always_ been afraid of them or anything. I just… I dunno. I started… like, maybe two years ago, I started having these weird dreams. About a lot of things, but sometimes dogs. Black dogs. Like recurring nightmares, I guess? Anyway,” he says, not waiting for John to react, “there’s something wrong about them, and it fucked up the way I see dogs, I guess.”

John blinks. “Gosh, I’m sorry,” he says. “It was just dreams that put you off them?”

“Eh, I never liked ‘em much before that, but…” He puts his hands in his pockets. “Man, I don’t know. I still have no idea what caused them, or anything like that. They were always so _vivid_ , you know? Like, I can remember how it feels when they bite. That ain’t normal.”

John shivers. “Wow.”

“It’s the weirdest shit, man,” Dave rambles, his brows knitting in an unusual display of frustration. “I don’t get it. I get scared of such dumb shit just because I have dreams. A few times, I had a dream that I was a bird or some shit, and there was this whole ton of birds flying past me, and I flipped my shit whenever I saw a god damn bird for months after that. I had dreams about things like, I dunno, catching on fire, and breaking myself into pieces and putting myself together a lot of times. Weird shit. Like that.” He pushes his shades up his nose, suddenly self-conscious, glaring ahead. “God, that is so fucking embarrassing. I don’t even know why I’m telling you.”

“Well… it’s okay,” John says awkwardly. “I won’t tell anyone. It’s your business and everything. But whatever you want to tell me, whatever it is, I promise I won’t laugh. That would be kind of mean. We’re friends, right? Anything you want to say, I’m totally - ”

“Hey Egbert, can we stop talking about this?”

“Yeah, sure. Whatever you want.”

They don’t talk about anything.


	4. Home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Getting curious.

When they reach their destination – having had no more run-ins with large dogs – Dave hefts his backpack on his shoulder and turns to John.

“Sorry you had to walk all the way over here with me or whatever,” he says.

“I volunteered, didn’t I?” says John. “It’s not like it’s any trouble.”

Dave gestures at his house. “Do you wanna come in again? I mean, we didn’t get to your house, but we could still hang out and do stupid shit if you want. Or you could at least have a snack or something before you go home. I dunno. I don’t care. Whatever you want.”

“I’ll come in,” John says. He pauses. “Does it – do you think your bro’s home yet?”

Dave snorts. “Man, what is it with you and my bro?”

“I dunno, he’s kind of a mystery! Isn’t he? Well, to me anyway. You talk about him and stuff, but apparently he’s never here and you don’t know where he goes? That’s weird.”

Dave sighs and heads up to the door. “Nah, Bro’s just not home sometimes. It’s no big deal. Come on.”

They leave their backpacks at the door; John notes that none of the boxes have been unpacked since he last saw the house, and the front hall has remained just as cluttered. Dave moves into the kitchen, opens the fridge, looks mournfully at the contents, and closes it again. “I always forget to buy shit when he’s gone,” he mutters. “Do you want water or something?”

“I’m good,” John says. He brightens up. “Hey, can I see your room?”

Dave blinks. “Uh. My room?”

“Yeah, you know… wherever it is. I’m just kinda wondering.”

“’Bout what?”

John shrugs. “I dunno, man. What it looks like. What you keep in there. Do you have, like, weird things? Is there secret bullshit?”

“Would I fuckin’ tell you if there was?” Dave demands. “I haven’t even known you that long, dude.”

John looks at him for a moment, and Dave must have misconstrued his stare as puppy eyes, because he sighs and turns around. “C’mon, I’ll show you.”

Dave leads him up a creaky staircase and through a windowless hallway, finally arriving at a room that looks like it should be a closet but actually has a reasonable amount of living space. It has a slanted ceiling and a window facing the cramped backyard. There’s a mess all over the floor, and all over the walls, too. John finds himself somewhat overwhelmed by the sheer volume of stuff, but he recovers.

“Wow,” he says. He kneels down on the floor. “Where do all these wires go?”

Dave indicates a set of turntables and a bunch of equipment that John doesn’t recognize. “Just gear. Computer, speakers, screen, mixing shit, soundboard, and that old laptop, which is pretty broken. Not that exciting.”

John regards the scramble of audio paraphernalia. It’s scattered all around the room, on practically every surface. “You do music? That’s awesome.”

It’s amazing how much offense Dave Strider can convey just by raising an eyebrow. “To say I ‘do music’ would be a gross understatement,” he says. “I make god damn art. An unwashed plebe such as yourself cannot even comprehend - ”

“Dude,” says John. “Are those _swords?”_

“They’re called katanas,” Dave says, as John abandons the wires and examines the blades on the wall. “They’re traditional Japanese swords, used by - ”

“What the hell is this?” John says, catching sight of the line stretched across Dave’s ceiling. “Strider, did you make a darkroom just to develop bad selfies? Oh wait, no, there’s some other - ”

“Wouldn’t touch those, dude, you might fuck ‘em up.”

“Whoa, is that a fossil?”

“John, can you stop being a god damn nerd for two seconds?” Dave says. “It’s just a room. It’s got a bunch of shit in it. It’s not really a big deal.”

John calms down. “Yeah, I know, I get it. I just didn’t know you had all this stuff. It’s kinda cool.”

Dave says something in response, but John doesn’t quite hear it, because something catches his eye – in the shelf of colorful records lined up beneath the turntables, there’s a small black book, just tucked into the corner as though poorly hidden. “Hey – what’s that?”

Dave starts. “Huh? What’s what?”

“That, in your shelf. That’s not a record. Is it?”

Dave moves to the side, shuffling nervously, as though ready to dive in front of John if he tries to retrieve the book. “It’s not really anything. Just a notepad.”

“How come it’s hidden like that?”

“It’s not hidden. It’s just there. How many shelves do you see in this room, Egbert?”

“Is it, like, a journal?” says John. “Or a diary or whatever? I don’t wanna read it, if you don’t want to show me. I’m not gonna go through your private stuff. I’m just wondering what it is.”

“Yeah, you say that,” Dave mutters. “You’re actually a nosy fuck.” He leans down and snatches the book out of the shelves; it’s about as big as his hand. “It’s not even a journal. It’s a shitty sketchbook.”

“Wow,” says John. “You do, like, a lot of artsy shit. Music, and photography, and drawing – I can’t do anything like that. Aside from play the piano,” he amends. “But that’s not too special, a lot of people can do that.”

“Piano’s all right,” says Dave. “But I’m not, like, a drawing person or anything. I just kinda scribble shit in here.” He opens the book and flips through it, scanning it critically. “It’s not supposed to be art.”

John slides over to him and peers over his shoulder. Dave’s right – he’s not really much of a drawing person. The images are heavy-handed and sloppy, the work of a boy with only the slightest interest in conveying pictures – but they’re definitely coherent.

“Those are faces,” John says.

“Yeah, no shit.”

“Who are they?”

“No one. Just characters, I guess.”

“They’re yours? Do you write, or draw comics or whatever?”

“I draw comics,” Dave says. “Ironic ones. But these aren’t in them. These are just people.”

John gazes at the tangle of faces on the page, sketchy, overlapping, disproportionate – many of them are recurring, humanoid monsters with strange teeth and the faint outlines of horns on their heads, little demons, snake-eyed. Others look basically human, including a bespectacled girl in what looks like a superhero outfit, and…

“Hey, that looks kinda like me,” John says, pointing to a buck-toothed figure with thick glasses.

He intended it to be a joke, but Dave tenses up in response. “Yeah, funny,” he says, turning the pages.

John looks at him, grinning. “What? Was it me? Did you just like my face that much that you drew - ”

“It’s not you,” Dave says. “They’re just people from my fucked up brain. It’s no big deal. Sometimes people I dream about.”

Dave flips pages quickly, too fast for John to pick up many more trends. They don’t even reach the blank pages before Dave snaps the book shut and tosses it aside. “Whatever, that’s boring.”

“I thought it was fun,” says John.

“You think everything is fun. Let’s just fuck around on the internet. We could play video games or something.”

He seems pretty keen to change the subject. John figures he’s pushed his friend enough today, between the dog and the room and the book, so he goes along with the plan.

They kill zombies until the sun starts to set. The blinds are drawn, so John loses track of time and has to take off rather abruptly in order to get home for dinner. For some reason, he feels apprehensive about leaving Dave Strider alone; it just seems like a bad idea, leaving him in this house with no one around. But Dave just calls him a nerd and waves him off and closes the door firmly behind him.

John kicks dirt walking home. He takes the same route as before, which leads him past a familiar house; he pauses.

“Tanner,” he says. “Come?”

The dog gets up and bounds over to him, sitting down when he reaches the end of the leash. John scratches his ears.

“Yeah, Dave didn’t mean it,” he says.

He’s not totally sure why he’s talking to the dog, much less lying to him as though he’s saving his feelings. But it feels kinda nice, so he continues. “There’s something up with him, you know? …I don’t really know what. He goes off about the most random things. Like sunglasses. And dogs. And weird aliens. I don’t know.” He hesitates. “I don’t know if I’ll ever find out – but I guess that’s okay. Friends accept friends for who they are, right? That’s the whole point.”

Tanner whines in response.

“Yeah.” John pats him on the head and shoulders his backpack. “I’ll see you later, boy.”

He walks home, wondering what it says about him that he has more straightforward conversations with dogs than he does with people.


	5. Locked In

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Home alone?

The third time John goes home with Dave, he starts to get concerned.

“Are you sure he’s okay?” he says.

“He’s fine,” Dave says, opening the refrigerator. It looks like there’s a new stock of foil-wrapped meals in there, but Dave ignores it all, instead retrieving a jug of water. “He’s never not fine.”

“Have you called him or anything? Texted him? Anything like that?”

“He doesn’t like me calling him or texting him, unless something really bad happens, and he knows it won’t, because I hold down the fort pretty well,” Dave says.

“That seems kinda irresponsible,” John says dubiously. “Say something _did_ happen, to either of you - ”

“Look, he’s probably gonna be back any day now, maybe even today,” says Dave. “You want water?”

“Sure.” John watches Dave pour the water. He’s not done yet. “You don’t even know where he goes, though?” he presses. “Does he do it, I dunno, for work or something?”

Dave sets down the glass in front of him. “No idea. I don’t care, so I don’t ask. As long as he comes back eventually, I don’t need to know where the hell he is.”

“You don’t ever call him when he’s gone?” John says, feeling a faint prickle of alarm. “Whenever my dad goes away for business or anything, he usually calls me every - ”

Dave slams the jug back into the fridge. “Egbert, something tells me that my bro and your dad are hella different people, so maybe stop with the comparisons?”

John shrugs, shrinking back into the chair. “I was just…” he trails off. “I just feel like… you must be worried about him. It’s been at least a few weeks by now, right? Has he ever taken that long?”

Dave chews on his lip. “A few times,” he says. “It’s always different, that’s all. I don’t think even he knows when he’s going to be back, for sure.”

John squeezes his fingers around the glass. Condensation runs between his knuckles. “I always think it’d be nice to not have my dad around,” he says. “Just so I could do whatever, without him getting on my back about it. But if he was ever actually not around, and I didn’t know why or anything… man, I’d probably flip out. I don’t know how you deal.”

Dave’s fingers curl up in his pockets. He presses his lips together. It’s subtle, but John sees it. “I deal.”

“Has it always been like this?” John asks.

“Pretty much. I’m kinda used to it.”

John hunches his shoulders. “I just keep thinking if something happens to him, then you - ”

“Nothing’s gonna _happen_ to him,” Dave says. “He’s fine. Okay? He’s always fine.”

He sounds basically normal, but when John looks at him, he realizes that Dave is angry. Maybe not screaming-mad, but the distress in his posture, his face, is impossible to miss. It’s not the obvious kind of upset, either, like with the dog – this looks like it goes deeper somehow. He’s breathing a bit too quietly, his hands quivering, his face just a little too neutral, and John can see him about to break apart underneath the careful mask, and that’s something that he just doesn’t want to deal with. Somehow, he doesn’t imagine that a Dave Strider meltdown would be a pretty sight.

John stands up, but then hangs back, uncertain. “Hey, don’t worry,” he says nervously, and he knows what a god damn one-eighty this is but he doesn’t know what else to do. “Don’t be upset, I’m sure he’ll come back. You’re probably right, he’s just… I’m sure he’ll come back.”

Dave gives an irritable shake. “Don’t fucking patronize me, Egbert,” he says. “I know you probably think I’m going to have some kind of accident and fall down the stairs and die while having eight seizures and choking on a taco and no one will be around to offer up a prayer to save my soul as I writhe in my last moments, but in reality I’m pretty sure I’m way more competent than you think I am, so you really don’t have anything to worry about.”

John’s still apprehensive, but he grins and knuckles his friend in the shoulder, angling to change the subject. “Yeah, I know. What do you wanna do?”

“Man, I don’t fuckin’ know. Call your stupid dad who actually cares about the shit you do and ask him if you can stay longer this time. We can draw bad comics. I’ll feed you shitty burritos. As long as you promise not to talk about any more awkward stuff.”

“I promise,” John says, even though he’s sure he’ll put his foot in his mouth at some point tonight. That’s just what he tends to do.

He goes out into the hallway to call his dad, who gives him permission to stay at Strider’s house until ten. The phone call doesn’t last more than a minute or so, but when John returns to the kitchen, Dave is gone.

“Dave?” he says.

He gives the lower floor a cursory glance, and then heads upstairs. The wooden planks creak under his feet.

A strange sense of panic rises in the pit of his stomach. He feels like he’s in the first few minutes of a horror movie – a million scenarios race through his mind as he ascends the poorly-lit stairway, all of them probably ridiculous but much too real at that moment, and he can’t quite get up the courage to call out Strider’s name again, but he gets to his friend’s room and the door is slightly ajar and he pushes it open –

…And Dave is right there, of course, sitting on his bed which is actually just a couple of mattresses piled on the floor, examining a camera.

John leans against the doorframe, exhaling sharply. “Shit, Dave, I didn’t know where you went. You couldn’t wait thirty seconds for me to finish calling my dad?”

Dave looks up at him. “I got bored.”

“You’re stupid.” He wanders across the room, trips over some wires, lands face-first on Dave’s bed, rights himself, and grins. “Let’s do something dumb.”

*

‘Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff’ has John in hysterics within minutes, while Dave looks on in awe, slowly shaking his head.

“You’re literally the biggest dork I’ve ever met,” he says. “These aren’t even that funny. They’re not supposed to be funny. They’re ironic.”

“Stairs…” John chokes.

Dave sighs. “You’re fucking with me. You don’t even seriously think they’re funny.”

“Nah, they’re not funny,” says John, taking his glasses off to wipe his eyes, still giggling. “They’re _so bad,_ dude. Where do you come up with this stuff?”

“Oh my god,” Dave mutters. He’s probably rolling his eyes behind those shades. “I dunno why I bother. You don’t appreciate the art. It’s all just goofy bad/good shit to you, like Nic Cage movies. I gave up trying to deal with your taste the day after I met you.”

“Sorry it’s so hard being too cool for school,” says John, snickering. “It’s way easier when you just don’t even try.”

They screw around with Dave’s computer for a while; John tries his hand at drawing bad MS Paint comics, but Dave gets secondhand embarrassment from his poor grasp of irony and confiscates the computer mouse. John gets curious about the icons on his desktop, in particular an odd familiar-looking red spirograph – but Dave notices, calls it malware, and deletes it.

At about six, they eat crappy microwaved burritos. John’s not sure how Dave Strider seems to live exclusively off of leftovers, with no intervening fresh meals to create the leftovers in the first place, but it’s a system that somehow works.

They return to zombie killing, which John isn’t very good at, and Dave keeps having to rescue him because he tends to dissolve into laughter whenever a particularly stupid-looking undead comes trundling along. It continues for a while, even after the sun is gone and they’ve started yawning; and eventually, when John’s avatar goes under and Dave fails to come and save him, he glances over to see that the other boy has fallen asleep against the wall.

John lets the controller fall into his lap, not quite sure what to do. He should probably wake him up, but he looks such a perfect combination of peaceful and stupid, with his shades crooked on his face, and his hair mussed, and his mouth slightly open… John resists the temptation to take a picture with his phone. Instead, he reaches over and takes hold of Dave’s shoulder, giving him a shake. “Hey, Dave.”

Dave’s head lolls. He remains unconscious. John shakes him again, a bit harder. “Dave Strider. Earth to Dave. I’m talkin’ to you.”

He moves Dave’s limbs around, takes stuff out of his pockets, rattles off Nic Cage quotes at his face, but nothing works. The kid sleeps like a rock. He gives up.

“Whatever, I’m going home,” he says. “See you in school, I guess. Or text you later when you wake up and realize I’m gone. You’ll miss me.”

He deliberates for a moment before giving Strider a careful hug around the shoulders. He’s not sure he would have been allowed to do it if Dave was awake, so he keeps it quick and exits the room. He switches off the lights behind him, and Dave Strider vanishes into the rush of darkness.


	6. Setup

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shit gets weird.

It becomes a regular occurrence, because John Egbert decides it must be a regular occurrence. Bro Strider does not come back for the next four days, and so John continues to follow Dave home and keep him company for hours each day. He never gets tired of it; he suspects Dave does, or will soon, but so far he hasn’t voiced any objections.

(John would have liked to return the favor and take him home a few times, but Dave’s still leery about the dogs in John’s neighborhood, and remains steadfastly uninterested regardless.)

They talk about stupid things. Mostly they hang out and play video games or surf the internet or eat. They would watch movies, but they can never agree on what’s okay. Sometimes they fall asleep. Occasionally only one of them falls asleep, and the other waits it out. They go outside and try to hit the one backyard tree with rocks. They go outside when it’s dark and lie on the dead grass and try to see the stars through the light pollution.  Dave is rather knowledgeable about constellations, and shows John fragments of images. John is a bit surprised by his expertise, but doesn't question it.

At some point, in the midst of their usual stream of vague, irrelevant babble, Dave makes an offhand comment about a girl at school. John feels it like a punch in the gut, and he can’t make himself understand why.

They don’t bring up Dave’s brother again, but John remains concerned. He wants to know what’s up with the guy, and where he goes, and what he does, and why he’s okay with leaving his fourteen-year-old charge alone for weeks on end without any contact – in a neighborhood they’ve just moved into, for Christ’s sake. John can’t make sense of it. He doesn’t mention it to his dad, lest someone flip a shit and call child protection services or something. That’s the last thing Dave needs. There’s just something wrong about the elder Strider’s absence. John avoids mentioning it out loud; it seems to upset Dave on some level, and John wishes they could talk about it.

Dave gets stressed out over the strangest things. That’s another thing John still doesn’t get.

Nonetheless, he rarely brings up things that he knows Dave will hate talking about, and they keep on safe subjects, even though their interests  aren’t all that related for the most part.

It’s not until that fourth day that he feels he has to say something.

“Seriously,” John says, following Dave up the front steps. “You haven’t heard _anything?_ Man, I’ve heard of business trips, but – dude, this is crazy. He can’t leave you alone for weeks like this. That can’t be legal.”

Dave smirks as he unlocks the front door. “You’re actually in luck, man, 'cause I just heard from him last night. He’s coming home tomorrow.”

John blinks. “Oh. Did he say where he’s been?”

“Nope.”

They wander inside. “Find out,” John says.

“What? Why?”

“Because you should know. That’s all. Why wouldn’t he tell you? Unless he’s doing something really bad.”

Dave scoffs. “Bro’s kind of a douchebag sometimes, but I’m pretty sure he’s not on the run or anything.”

John shrugs uncertainly. “If you say so. Did you guys ever unpack any of these boxes?”

The front hallway has retained a consistent amount of cardboard box clutter. Dave shrugs. “Never cared that much,” he says. “I guess as soon as I need something out of one, I’ll start rooting around. Haven’t had to, yet.” He lets his backpack slide off his shoulders. “What are we doin’ today? Games? Faux-philosophic bullshit?”

“What’s this?” John says.

It’s caught his eye. The package. The one from the first day they met, the one that got delivered to John’s house. It’s sitting on a pile of boxes, right where Dave left it that same day.

“That thing?” Dave says. “I haven’t touched it, dude. It’s Bro’s shit.”

“Really?” John says curiously. “You didn’t open it or anything? Just left it there? How do you even know it’s for him, and not you?”

Dave shrugs. “Dude. Where would I get packages from? Anyway, that’s old shit that got lost. Whatever’s in there is probably wrecked.”

“Wanna just take a look, though?” John says.

“Huh? Why?”

“I dunno. I forgot about it for a while, but now it’s kinda killing me, to be honest. It’s so weird that it ended up on my doorstep and we don’t even know what the hell it is.”

Dave hesitates. “You want to see?”

“Do you?”

Dave sighs. “I don’t really care. We can take a look. It might even be fuckin’ empty – it’s not like the thing is well-sealed, but let’s go.”

They take it up to Dave’s room, where Dave puts it on the windowsill before ripping open the weakened cardboard flaps. A flurry of fragmented tissue paper floats out like a cloud of moths; Dave waves it out the window while John pulls the remaining paper apart.

In the box is a set of two disks. The symbols and letters on the brown paper are faded, but John can still make it out.

“Dude,” he says, adjusting his glasses and squinting at the cover. “These are games.”

Dave’s hands, still busy chasing fibers out of his window, slow to a halt as though they’ve wound down. “They’re what?”

“They’re games, like PC games, I think. They look like disks in… hold on.” He looks closer, narrowing his eyes. “Hey, Dave. This is fucking crazy. I think this is… this looks like Sburb.”

Dave stares at him. His eyes are wide open. “Say that again.”

“Sburb,” John repeats. “You know, that game that was gonna be released about a year or two ago, and it never happened? They pulled it. Didn’t even send it out in beta. Scrapped the whole thing. I was pissed, man, I was gonna play it – but it wasn’t a big deal after a while.”

“Yeah, I, uh… I know,” says Dave. “I ordered the beta too.”

“You did? No way. So this _was_ for you?”

“Uh, yeah, I guess, but… they never sent out the beta. So if that’s packaged to look like Sburb, it’s… it's not. It can’t be legit.”

John bites his tongue. “Probably not,” he says. “But, wow, how cool would it have been if you got your copy of the beta. If you got a leaked Sburb. That would be awesome.”

“I guess,” says Dave.

John snickers. “How come you ordered it if you don’t even care?”

“I don’t know,” Dave mutters. “People were talking about it on the internet. I don’t know what I would have done with it, really, it was gonna be multiplayer only and I didn’t know anyone who was into games like this, I guess I just went for it because other people were doing it.”

John slits the case open with his fingernail and slides the disk out. “Hey, it looks okay.”

“Dude, that’s almost definitely a blatant fake. Why would Sburb show up on my doorstep, years after the release got canceled, leaked but undamaged even though the packaging looks like it’s been through hell? Seems pretty goddamn suspicious to me.”

“Yeah.” John stares regretfully at the CD art before slipping it back into the case. “Shame we can’t run it, just to find out. We would be, like, the only people to play it.”

“It would probably either not run at all, or give me a virus,” says Dave. “Let’s ditch it.”

John brightens up. “Hey, what if we tried running it on your laptop?”

“My laptop?” Dave says blankly.

“Yeah! You know, the old thing under your desk, the one that’s collecting dust bunnies because you literally never use it.”

“What? You mean the giant paperweight? John, I don’t even know if that thing’s gonna work at all, let alone run a fairly modern game. C’mon, just leave it alone. Throw the damn thing away.”

“You sure?” John says. He holds up one disk, which bears the faded label of “client.” “It wouldn’t do any harm, if we just ran it on the old laptop, right? We could just see if it’s legit. You’re probably right that it won’t work.”

Dave hesitates, and then gives a sigh of resignation, crawling under the desk to get the laptop. “Fine,” he mutters. “If we can just throw it away after.”

It takes John a moment to register that he might have actually gotten on Dave’s nerves. The boy seems caught somewhere between annoyance and nervousness – John’s not sure why he would be nervous, but his hands are shaking with anxiety as he hooks the laptop to the outlet and boots it up.

The thing is definitely old. It takes a while to sign on completely, and a few more minutes to connect to the internet. After that, Dave pops the CD drive and hands the laptop over to John, scooting out of the way.

“You do it,” he says.

John gives him a sidelong glance. “Man, you’re being kinda weird about this. Are you okay?”

“I’m doing great,” Dave says stubbornly. He hides his hands in his pockets, but John’s not fooled; Strider is on edge. “Just do it.”

John considers pausing, rejecting that course of action entirely, pulling the plug and throwing the game away like Dave says – something feels wrong, something’s not right about this, between Dave’s apprehension and the odd nature of the package itself. He feels it now, and he almost just wants to stop.

But in the end, he takes out the disk again, and puts it in the drive, and pushes it shut, and stares at the screen, waiting.

Nothing happens. The landscape wallpaper remains bland and undisturbed. No new icons appear; no boxes leap up from the green. John slumps back.

“There,” he says. He feels relieved, but he’s not sure why. “There you go. Dud game. Maybe someone’s idea of a joke, or - ”

“Look,” says Dave.

John looks. A white box has appeared on the screen. A red spirograph forms and reforms inside it, just above a growing load bar.

“Shit,” he says.

“Maybe you should stop it,” says Dave, but John doesn’t move, staring intently as the bar fills with red. They both stay still, watching its progress – and just before it finishes, Dave lunges forward to slam the laptop shut, but he doesn’t get there in time. The load bar snaps back into blank space. The spirograph disappears, taking the white box with it, and the entire screen goes black.

Dave relaxes. “Nice job, Egbert,” he says, his harsh tone belying the clear relief in his body language. “You broke my laptop.”

“Oh, calm down, it’s not like you used it any - ”

“Um.”

Something about Dave’s voice makes John turn to look at him. Dave stands up, slowly, as though afraid of frightening a skittish animal; he shuffles back, trying to be subtle about it but not doing a very good job. He locks eyes with John and holds his gaze. John stares, bewildered.

“Oh, wow," Dave says, running a hand through his hair. He looks like he's in the middle of a particularly earth-shattering epiphany.

“What?” says John, growing uncomfortable. He starts to fidget, suddenly nervous to turn back around.

“Um. John – don’t – don’t look at the laptop.”

Prickles run down the back of John's neck. “Huh?”

“Yeah, don’t look at it. Just trust me. Okay? Um. Get up. Just put it down on the desk. Without looking at it. Yeah. And. Step away.”

“Dude, what are you talking about?” John says.

Dave’s voice is controlled – but his face is dead white, the color leached out, frozen. John starts panicking internally. “Come on,” Dave says. “I just don’t want you to freak out. Don’t freak out.”

“ _You’re_ freaking out, dude. What’s so bad about the laptop?”

And yet, in spite of himself, he doesn’t look down. Dave’s expression, and his voice, have got him scared. He doesn’t want to know what’s happening on the screen right now. He hooks his fingers around the edges of the laptop.

“Put it down,” Dave says. “Or drop it. Or throw it. Whatever. I don’t care. Get it away from you.”

Dave’s composure is disturbed now. He’s sweating. He’s panicking. John can tell.

Something’s wrong with the room. The walls don’t seem right. Something about them just refuses to compute in John’s head, like they’re flickering out of focus. Like the world is glitching. Everything feels like a dream.

He pushes the laptop onto the desk, jumps away, and turns around.

There’s nothing wrong with the laptop. The screen is still dark, but it looks fine.

He laughs weakly and elbows Dave. “You asshole. You had me going.”

Dave doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t ease up. Just stares, and raises a finger to point at the desk.

John looks.

Something is emerging – not an image on the black screen. It’s coming out of the CD drive.

John stares, hardly believing his eyes. The laptop casing melts around the drive with a hiss, and it bubbles up out of the cracks, something tar-black that seems to throw itself forward, growing out of nothing. The two boys pin themselves against the wall, John with his heart beating in his throat, urging himself to wake up, to get out of the dream because this must be a dream, this can’t happen in real life, can it – ?

\- Except it can, it’s happening right now, and John knows it’s real because he can smell it, and it burns his nose, a smell like rotting meat and damp earth, like molten steel and smoke. Dave snatches a katana off of the wall, and John feels a crazy urge to laugh. Whatever’s going on right now, he has a feeling it’s not going to be bothered by a blade. It feels like a hallucination.

The thing is the game, he can't explain how he knows, and it rises, taking over the desk, a mess of writhing limbs, colors surging over the folds of its surface, white and green fluids leaking from tears in its skin, and that’s when appendages appear from it, claws – no, hands, reaching out, and a head, finally a body falling to the ground with a wet thud and a splatter of viscous black fluid.

The glistening figure recoils on its hands and knees, and Dave lowers the katana, his hands shaking so badly that John is afraid he’ll drop the weapon. They lean forward, squinting, tense in the sudden silence.

The figure is half-formed but distinguishable. It raises itself up onto flowing knees, horns protrude from its head, liquid hair flattened on its malformed skull.

It throws open an unnaturally-wide mouth, a black gash that severs shining black features, white eyes too enormous for its face, its throat sucking and bubbling as though gasping for air.

“ _Vannnn… tassssss…”_

Dave screams.

As the blackness spreads out a thousand limbs and tendrils, feeling blindly across the room, John drags Dave out of the room and slams the door shut.

“Run,” he says, pulling Dave by the elbow. “C’mon, _run!”_

Dave is hyperventilating, his eyes flung wide, helpless, and John pulls him toward the staircase – but there is no staircase, it’s gone, the hallway stretches out forever in front of them, lined in metal windows that lead nowhere. John feels panic like blood in his throat, but he forces it down, he can’t, not now, not with Dave like this, not with something behind them already scratching lightly, persistently, at the door, as though asking permission to be let out.

“I knew it, I knew it, I knew it,” Dave gasps.

John pulls Dave forward, hurtles through the dreamlike hallway, through the endless windows all divided into six, into the shadows ahead, until –

“Door, door,” John says, skidding to a halt. It’s tucked into the space between two windows, and he slams it open, pushes Dave inside, and dives in after him.

The door closes after them – leaving them in weightless dark.

John holds onto the doorknob, thank God, or they might have been lost, because they don’t seem to weigh anything anymore. Dave is gripping John’s wrist, gasping quietly in the pitch blackness; otherwise, everything is silent. They float in the air. John kicks down, but the floor seems to have gone.

Something moves in the darkness.

The sense of slithering mass, of shapeless rolling flesh, makes John’s skin crawl. He starts to speak to Dave. Something seals his mouth shut. A slow moan comes out of the depths, and it _feels_ ancient, and it makes the hairs stand up on the back of John’s neck, and he gives the doorknob a violent twist and breaks out into the corridor.

Dave lands half on top of him. He can breathe again. The door is gone.

But the black figure has emerged from the room, hunched over in the middle of the hallway; it takes it less than a second to look up and see them. It’s changed now, it’s different, the game is altering itself, altering everything around it, horns growing from its head and along its spine, mismatched fangs jutting from its mouth, its mouths, it has many now, open and hungry and focused, and the glistening color and black of its body is changing, textures washing over the surface, scales and pockmarks and flames and feathers, always feathers…

It stares at them with an increasing number of blank white eyes, and they stare back, and then it moves toward them, and they scramble to their feet and run.


	7. Gameplay

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Count your HP.

Lights burst around them like camera flashes. They’re crouching motionless behind another door, this one with solid ground under their feet, trying not to breathe too loud.

“Dave, what the hell is that thing?” John whispers. “You said you knew.”

A circle of light flashes near them, illuminating Dave’s face, his eyes round with terror. “It’s the game,” he says, gulping. “I don’t know how, it’s, it’s been in my dreams, dude, I’ve had nightmares about it, for – I don’t even know – but it’s the game. It. It _found_ me. Somehow.”

“But that’s impossible!” John hisses. “Games don’t _do_ that shit!”

“It’s all wrong, the game’s wrong,” Dave says shakily. “It’s broken.”

“Yeah, no shit it’s broken – what was that thing?”

“The person-looking thing? I have no god damn clue - ”

“But _you_ screamed - ”

“Shh!”

They fall into silence. Outside the door, something moves, and they both know what it is, and they stop breathing.

A firefly lands on John’s shoulder, blinking a soft yellow light. Another follows it, and another, and another. John is illuminated in tiny golden lights, very different from the ones further out in the darkness, the sharp strobe-like bursts that shift and morph in the depths.

Dave stares at him. John stares back, equally bewildered.

The thing outside draws in a rattling breath, coughs, hacks, and a hand slaps against the door.

Dave jumps, grips the katana tighter. He looks at John and motions out towards the darkness, his eyes questioning.

John shakes his head wordlessly, unwilling to take the risk. He doesn’t want to be near the monster, but the prospect of heading out into the darkness is even worse.

Dave shrugs. His eyes harden, and he throws the door open, leaping forward.

John follows, almost without thinking; the fireflies take off from his arms in a cloud of light. The game has myriad limbs, and it braces itself against the walls as it moves. Gold jewelry hangs from some of its arms, along with tattered cloth, pieces of ruined skin, black exoskeleton, jutting tentacles, heads human and alien and animal splitting in two and falling apart.

John bolts past it, the fireflies streaming into the folds of its skin, just as it shrieks and shatters.

He doesn’t hang around to see what it’s going to do. An unintelligible stream of voices follows him as he races after Dave.

They turn a corner into another hallway, splashing through puddles now, fighting through mist. The hallway has the familiar creaking wood of Dave’s house, but it goes on forever, doors and windows and other  halls appearing at random.

There’s a hiccup in spacetime. Everything dissolves into pixels; when their surroundings return, they’ve jumped ahead a few meters.

“What the hell is it doing to your house?” John yells.

“I don’t know!” Dave says. “It’s trying to run itself or something! And it’s doing a shit job!”

“Well, you said it was broken!” John snaps. “Can we stop it?”

“I dunno, man, something tells me ctrl/alt/delete won’t do it - ”

A staircase grows out of the darkness in front of them. They fly down into the shadows.

“Will these take us to the ground floor, do you think?” John says breathlessly.

“No idea,” says Dave.

John glances over his shoulder. The game is lurching down the hallway, its surface crawling with insects, sending swarms into the floor. One of the heads splits open, vomiting black blood and stars onto the floorboards. John’s heart jumps into his throat and he tries to pick up the pace.

They reach the bottom. John almost trips over the last stair; Dave catches him and they keep running.

They’re moving so quickly, hardly able to see in the darkness, that they hit the wall with bruising force and rebound.

“Oh no, what?” Dave groans, peeling himself off the boards.

John feels around the edges in the dim light, totally lost. “Is this – no – is this a dead end?”

“Can’t be,” Dave pants. “It can’t trap us like that, there must be a way out, there must be a way to win – shit, I dropped the katana - ”

John trips over something, barely maintaining his balance. “What - ?!”

“Those are boxes,” Dave says. “This is – wait, shit, this is my _basement_. How’d we get down here?”

“I didn’t even know you had a basement!”

“It’s shitty. It’s like this little stupid closet under the house, and it’s full of boxese, and somehow we’re stuck here?!”

Disoriented, John knocks over a box. It breaks open on the floor, spilling… dozens of pool balls. “What the _hell?!”_

Dave is just as confused. He tries to touch the wall, maybe to regain his sense of space, but it’s not solid somehow, and he falls forward, and the black liquid smears onto his arm and his shirt. It shimmers like oil. John touches it to make sure it’s real, and shivers at how cold it is.

He becomes conscious of a hollow ticking noise.

“Go back,” Dave says. “We have to go back. Come on.”

They take off, running away from the dead end, but it’s hard to run when their shoes stick to the floor, even though they have to run, because the morphing being is nowhere to be seen and John looks over his shoulder to see fanged creatures – oh god, dogs, and birds, black and misshapen, hurling themselves out of the wall and into the ground.

“Don’t look back,” John urges, hoping that Dave will trust him now. “Seriously – just keep going - ”

But the things behind them let out a screeching wail, and Dave halts as though his blood has turned to ice. John tries to move him. “Dave, come _on!”_

But Dave looks back, and there are dogs lurching toward them, dripping, mouths uneven and full of shifting teeth, wings and tendrils sprouting in odd numbers from their liquid fur, and Dave shrinks, his face drawn with horror, as though he’s staring straight into hell.

John pulls on Dave’s elbow, forcing the other boy to stumble after him, and at last Dave breaks eye contact and they bolt into the dark.

“John,” Dave gasps, his footsteps pounding on the floor. “It’s stupid to keep doing this, man, we have to figure out how to actually stop it. It’ll just keep chasing us forever - ”

“I know, I know,” John says, trying to hold down his own panic. “I’m trying to - ”

But he doesn’t get to finish his sentence. A gust of wind hits him from the side, literally out of nowhere; he careens into Dave and they both slam into the ground.

He rolls over and looks up. Dave is already on his knees, struggling to his feet. A mass of darkness materializes through the wall, bubbling outward, peeling away from the wood, dragging itself into Dave’s path with a looming purpose.

Then it explodes open with a scream, bursting into five coal-eyed bird heads, swaying on the ends of unnaturally long necks, black feathers streaming down and landing like raindrops on the floor. Each of the birds are razor-beaked, teeth growing out of their faces, fluid dripping from their mouths; they coil on the game’s bloated body, rattling and shrieking in Dave Strider’s face. Jaws snap at the edges of his body.

Something strikes John in the face, knocking his glasses off his nose. They clatter into the shadows, out of reach.

He looks up again, just in time to see a tendril whip up out of the dark, blindsiding Dave Strider as he stares transfixed into the avian faces.

The boy doesn’t even have time to scream before it wraps around his neck and drags him up into the air.


	8. Gone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What?

“ _Dave!”_

The shriek that tears from John’s throat doesn’t even feel like his own voice. He can’t see anything without his glasses, but he can hear, and he hears Dave give a strangled yell, cut off abruptly in a loud, messy cracking noise. John retches, sobbing.

For the first time, he understands that they’re both going to die.

The monster undulates, groaning, crying, snarling, reaching out with claws and teeth, thousands of eyes and mouths leaking in its skin. John stares up, choking on his own terror.

Then something races past him in a blur.

A white figure slices through the dark, blinding against the backdrop of black. It moves faster than John would have thought possible, twisting and rippling – something cuts the air before it, shining metal, a blade – and the figure slashes forward, cleaving the darkness in two.

The monster lets out an ungodly loud scream. It collapses in on itself and retreats toward the back wall, dropping Dave, whose body hits the ground with a sickening thud and doesn’t move. The game seals itself with a seam of molten red, but the figure – a man, John can barely make out – bears down, burns through wings and teeth and screeching bird heads, advances unafraid. Black and white liquid seeps out on the ground, and the man just walks forward, stepping over Dave’s motionless body, ignoring the game’s wails.

The man takes a few steps forward and pauses, coiling. Then he springs up and slams his blade through the ceiling.

The monster keens, pulsing, thousands of bodies forming and half-forming and collapsing again in its mass as it folds in on itself, flickering like a glitch.

It folds up into a tiny point.

It vanishes.

There’s a moment of utter quiet. John can’t move.

A circle of wood on the ceiling begins to glow, hisses, turns red, and disintegrates into ashes. Dave’s old laptop falls through the ceiling and crashes to the ground, impaled on the blade.

The white figure turns around and walks back towards John, who cowers – but the man just bends down and picks something off the floor, and John finds his glasses being slipped back onto his face by a pair of half-gloved hands.

John blinks and looks up into the face of his rescuer. The guy’s probably in his early thirties, his face curiously passive for someone who just destroyed an eldritch terror; his eyes are amber, half-covered by a set of angular shades, his blonde hair set underneath a baseball cap.

As the man stands up and turns away, John realizes that he’s just met Bro Strider.

He sits up. The dark basement is gone. They’re in Dave’s living room, which, aside from some broken glass, hardly looks the worse for wear. John gives a shuddering sigh, wondering if any of the events in the last hour were actually real.

...But they must have been real, he remembers. Because Dave is still lying there, curled in on himself, unmoving.

“John?” calls a voice from outside. There’s a knock on the door. “John?”

“That’s my dad,” John says numbly.

The elder Strider glances over his shoulder, raising an eyebrow. “Go let him in, kid,” he says. “What are you lookin’ at me for?”

John can’t feel his fingers for some reason, but he gets up, legs quivering, and wanders through the kitchen towards the front hall. His mind feels sluggish and cold, everything in his brain feels unfamiliar, like it’s not his own. He watches himself grip the knob and open the front door, sees himself stare placidly into his father’s face, takes in his own stupid dead-eyed expression. He sees his father hug him, watches as he disentangles himself from his dad’s arms and turns and wanders back into the house, staring a thousand miles into space.

He reaches the living room and hugs himself, hanging back, gazing at the Striders. He hardly registers his father’s hand on his shoulder.

Bro Strider turns toward him again, and reaches out. “Hand me that, will you?”

He’s pointing at the package. The same stupid package, which has somehow moved from Dave’s room and now sits on the kitchen counter, conveniently within John’s grasp.

John surrenders it, in a trance. Strider takes the box and rifles through it, tearing the paper aside until he uncovers a small notecard. He glances at it, drops the box to the floor, and walks back over to his brother.

Dave still doesn’t move. Strider crouches beside him, removes his own stupid shades, and nudges his brother with his knuckles.

Slowly, as though every inch hurts him, Dave Strider uncurls and sits up. His skin is white, his shades gone; he’s shielding his collarbones with his hands. Bro takes his wrists and peels his hands away, touching his fingers to the kid’s clavicle; the lightest brush makes Dave blanch even paler, shivering in pain.

Bro hands him the notecard.

Dave looks down.

Birds sing outside. The setting sun casts everything in gold as Dave reads the letter.

He presses his knuckles to his mouth as tears spill over his cheeks. After a moment, he shudders, and starts crying. Not blubbering in terror, like before. Honest-to-god crying. Deep, wrenching sobs. John wonders if this is what it sounds like when someone’s heart breaks.

Strider shuffles forward on his knees, starts to touch Dave’s shoulder, stops himself. John stares, at a loss. He wants to help somehow, but…

“Hey, Dave, come on,” Strider says, in the awkward, beseeching tones of one unused to being especially kind. He throws a glance at the Egberts, and turns back to his brother. “Come on…”

The letter slips out of Dave’s hands. Strider scoops him up effortlessly, cradling him like a child, and turns back toward the Egberts.

“Think you’d better go.”

John can’t go. Doesn’t want to go. He wants to stand there and cry and ask stupid questions, but Dave is clinging to his brother’s shirt and choking on his own tears, and John feels a deep humiliation when he imagines himself breaking down.

As Strider retreats up the stairs with Dave, John bends down and retrieves the letter. It has as many water-damage stains as the package itself, but he can still read the words, carefully picked out in lavender ink.

_Dear Mr. Strider,_

_It has come to my attention that I possess something of yours. This CD originally held the beta version of the video game “Sburb”, scheduled for release earlier this year. Skaianet pulled it at the last minute, citing unspecified code problems that made it unplayable; they scrapped the entire project and never made the game available to the public in any capacity. This copy must have been leaked by accident, and somehow managed to fall into my hands. It was, however, intended for you._

_The game does not run; indeed, the CD itself seems entirely nonfunctional, although harmless. I return it to you merely as a courtesy. Its only possible value is sentimental._

_Regards,_

_Rose Lalonde_

Something stirs in the back of John’s mind. Something is wrong, but he doesn’t care what it is anymore.

He leaves the house, numb, without saying a word.


	9. Listen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A conversation. Some answers, but not many that make sense.

John rings the doorbell. Bro Strider answers. He looks tired.

“Is he here?” John asks tentatively.

The man sighs and rubs his eyelids. “Yeah, he’s here. He’s asleep. You want me to tell him something for you?”

John’s stomach drops in disappointment. “Um, no, I guess not.” He scuffs his shoe on the porch and glances up. At some point, Strider has abandoned the baseball cap, and his blonde hair sticks up in spikes; he’s got circles under his eyes. He’s still composed, but he looks a bit of a mess.

“Maybe… tell him to text me or something when he’s feeling better?” John says. “I dunno. I guess I’ll see you later.”

He turns to walk away.

“Hold on,” says Strider.

John looks back at him, uncertain.

Strider leans against the doorway, rubbing his jaw, and gives John a look of weary contemplation. He looks like an adult, John realizes; one not totally unlike his own father. His old-soul demeanor throws off John’s preconception of him as an irresponsible young guy. “You want to come in and talk to me for a few minutes?”

“Um… sure,” says John. He’s not sure what exactly Strider wants to talk about, but... “Why not.”

Strider leads him into the kitchen. It almost feels like John’s familiar routine with Dave, except instead of Dave, there’s a muscular thirty-something with stubble and an even goofier pair of shades. It would be funny if the circumstances were less grim. They sit down at the kitchen table; John plays with the hem of his shirt, not sure where to look.

“So his clavicles got fractured,” Strider says. He says it like it’s relatively good news. “That thing misjudged, I guess – didn’t quite get his neck. But he’s going to be okay. He just needs to take it easy for a while.”

John doesn’t really know how to respond.

Strider gives him a searching look. “It was kinda your fault, right?”

The question is so blunt that John backs away, discreetly trying to flatten himself into his chair. “Yeah, I guess it was,” he says. Somehow, he doesn’t want to dress up the details or make excuses, not to this guy. “I didn’t know it would do _that_ …”

Strider chuckles unexpectedly. “’Course you didn’t. I wouldn’t have figured you would know.”

There’s a moment of silence before John gets up the courage to say something.

“What _was_ it?” he says. Then, suddenly, he can’t stop talking. “What did it want with Dave? And – and why did it follow him like that? How did it know all that stuff he was afraid of, and what did it do to your house, and what did everything mean when it happened? How did he end up with it, and who - ”

Strider raises a hand. “Slow down, dude.”

John shuts up.

Strider folds his arms on the table, staring down in thought. “Guess I should start from the beginning, huh.”

John shrugs, mute.

Strider sighs, pressing his fingertips to his temples. “You want the whole story?"

"Yeah," John admits. "I guess I really do."

Strider stares down at the table. "He started out basically normal, right?" he begins, slowly. "I mean… as normal as you can be when you’re a tween trying to imitate your basketcase older brother. The weirder shit started when he was about twelve, I guess. And it wasn’t even that weird - not good, but not _that_ abnormal, you know? He just… got depressed. Lonely. He just felt alone. That’s all. Kinda out of the blue. I guess the anxiety kinda picked up around that time, too. For no real reason that he told me – it just kind of manifested, and I figured he was going through a hard time, like a lot of teenagers do, and I took him to a few shrinks but he didn’t like it, so I just tried to help him out myself.”

John shifts uncomfortably. "Does he, uh... does he know you're telling me this stuff?"

"Even if he didn't, you'd need to know it in order to get the whole picture," Strider says. "But yeah, he does. Do you want to hear it or not?"

John bites his nails. Strider continues.

“It got weird pretty fast. He had night terrors. You ever lived with someone who has night terrors? Nah, I guess you haven’t. It’s not really nice waking up at four in the morning with your little bro screamin’ his head off at nothing, I’ll tell you that.”

“Yeah, I remember he said something about nightmares,” John says.

“Did he? Well, they weren’t really your typical nightmares, they happened pretty much every night, still do, and they were about the most bizarre shit – but whatever he dreamed about gave him trouble. He was pretty average growin’ up, in terms of what got on his nerves, and then, suddenly… he was scared of everything.” He runs his hand through his hair. “Something was up. I just didn’t know what the hell to do about it.”

“Is that why you moved?” John says.

“I’m gettin’ there, hold your damn horses.”

John shuts himself back up.

“So a while later, I guess when he was about thirteen, he changed a bit. He started getting restless. He couldn’t really explain why, but it was pretty obvious he was starting to hate the city. And I didn’t really see why we would stay there if we didn’t have to, so we started looking at places. And for some reason, god only knows, he got attracted to this place. And after about a year of all the same shit on repeat, we moved here.”

John wants to say something defensive, but he’s not sure this is the right time.

“The restlessness, the way everything got worse…. All that stuff happened around the time when the Sburb beta was supposed to come out. I still don’t know exactly what that did to him, but something was off about it, you know? It kept coming up, a long time after they announced they wouldn’t release it. He couldn’t let it go. Or it couldn’t let him go.” He looks straight at John. “It was like it was following him. I know it sounds crazy. You ever feel anything like that?”

“No,” says John.

“Yeah, not sure what I expected there." He shrugs. "I don't know. Seems like it zeroed in on him.”

“The game did?”

“Yeah, the game. C’mon, connect the dots.”

“But why did it crawl out of the computer and chase us?” John demands, frustrated. “Shit like that doesn’t just happen.”

“I don’t know,” Strider says. “At least, I don’t know exactly how it mutated or glitched to be able to do that, because that exposure was hells of kinds of dangerous, for you and for itself.”

“But why - ”

“Okay,” Strider interrupts, steepling his fingers and looking at John. “Listen. I don’t know everything, and I can’t give you all the answers you want. But I’ll take a guess. All right?”

“All right.”

“As long as you don’t mind the fact that you’re not gonna get it. That’s not a judgment on you or anything. Just how it is. You’re not gonna get it. I’m telling you that right now.”

“Okay,” says John.

Strider raises an eyebrow at him. “Really? You’re okay with that? Thought you wanted answers.”

John shifts in discomfort. “Well… I do. It would be disappointing if it didn’t make sense to me, but… I don’t know, I guess I’d just like to know that there _is_ an answer. Understanding it would kind of be a nice bonus, though.”

Strider looks at him a moment, and then sighs. “All right. The game wasn’t supposed to exist. It was a mistake – I don’t know whose mistake, but generally a mistake.”

“Yeah, I know, the release got canceled.”

“Nope. Well, yes. But it’s deeper than that. The game was never supposed to even appear, at all – but it did anyway. What you saw in this house the other day was a cannibalization of timelines.”

John stares, uncomprehending.

Strider gives a mutter of resignation and elaborates. “In theory, there’s an infinite series of deviating timelines in the universe,” he says, “so there was an infinite number of possible outcomes for Dave’s experience of that game. The game wasn’t meant to show up, but it showed up anyway, and focused on him, so for every possible event within Dave’s game, another piece ended up in the thing that came after him. It was trying to piece itself together and run, but it went fuckin’ crazy, I guess. Maybe it wanted to use him to run somehow - or maybe by killing him, it wanted to commit suicide…? It was in pain, that’s all I could tell, broken into pieces and trying to live. Can’t explain individual bits, like the birds that tried to eat him or the dogs that tried to kill him, or the goddamn cueballs… ”

He was clearly trying to dumb it down, but it still makes John’s head swim. “To be honest, I barely understood any of that.”

“Yep. Wouldn’t have thought otherwise.”

“How do you know that stuff?”

Strider chuckles. “That’s too big a question for you, Egbert. Anything else?”

John hesitates, trying to think. “I just still don’t get it,” he admits at last. “Why did it pick Dave? What _is_ it, in the first place? What was supposed to happen?” He pauses. “And… who’s Rose?”

Strider bites his lip, in a way that reminds John painfully of Dave. He regards John for a long moment.

“You’ll get it, someday,” he says.

Something about that ‘someday’ makes John nervous. He suddenly feels impossibly small..

 “Okay,” he says reluctantly, leaning back. “I guess I’ll wait until… someday.”

Strider looks at him. Really looks at him, takes off his shades and scrutinizes him hard. John stares wordlessly into those golden eyes. It feels like Strider is picking him apart.

Then the man sighs and stands up. “Whatever,” he says. “You should probably be gettin’ home. I’ll tell Dave you stopped by.”

John jumps up. “Wait!” he says, without thinking. He catches himself. “Who… who are you?”

Strider tilts his head. “An outrageously awesome dude with a wicked swing?”

John shakes himself. “No, no, I mean – who _are_ you? What do you _do?_ And why were you gone for so long?” As Strider starts to answer, John sucks in a breath, gathering his nerve. “And why did you leave Dave alone by himself all that time?”

For the first time, Strider looks caught off his guard. He recovers, but he definitely looks shaken. “Dave could handle himself if - ”

“But – but,” John says desperately, “he couldn’t. You said yourself, he’s depressed and anxious and gets scared of weird things, and that’s all true, and – look, no offense or anything, but since when is it an okay idea to leave someone alone for weeks on end without contact when they’re sad and afraid all the time? Since when is that safe, no matter how many shitty swords he’s got with him? How does that make sense?”

Strider’s face hardly changes during John’s outpouring, but his eyes grow cold. “He didn’t mind me being gone, and he always knew how to contact me,” he says. “He wanted me to go – I guess it makes him feel more capable. Granted, I wouldn’t have gone away at all, if I’d known he would end up in the company of someone who led his worst demons right to him.”

John feels like he’s been slapped in the face. Strider reads it loud and clear in his expression. He thaws.

“Yeah, I know,” he says. “That wasn’t fair. It’s more my fault than yours. It's okay.”

John knows that's not really true, and he wants to call bullshit, but Strider’s change of heart takes the fight out of him somehow.

Strider leans against the doorway, gazing at the floor. “I shouldn’t have,” he says quietly. “But I knew him. He hated feeling like I was giving up anything for him, like I was protecting him, like he wasn’t on my level yet. And I got that. And I gave him chances, and he did fine. Until…”

He trails off, but John knows how that sentence would have ended.

He folds his arms over his chest. He would love to disappear into the ground right about now. It’s ironic, in the dumbest way, that he, John Egbert, the more-or-less lonely kid living an unexciting life in suburbia and spending most of his time on the internet, ended up being trouble for Dave Strider of all people.

Strider lets out a deep sigh and passes his hand over his eyes. “Listen, Egbert, you’re a good kid. I can tell you are. Really. And you did your best to take care of him, and that’s been great of you. But you’re gonna have to put all of this behind you.”

He guides John towards the front door. John feels a stab of fear. “All of it? How much?”

Strider shrugs. “I don't know. However much you can.”

They reach the door. John feels himself starting to panic. If he doesn’t say something now, he might lose his chance.

Strider opens the door.

“Are you going to stay in Washington?” John blurts out.

Strider looks at him. His gaze is newly gentle. “Don’t know yet,” he says. “That depends on a lot of things.”

“You – you can’t go back,” John says, hating how small and pathetic  he sounds. He amends. “I mean, you can – I guess it’s up to you in the end – but – I – I don’t want you to.”

They look at each other for a long moment. Strider reaches out, resting a hand on John’s shoulder.

“I know,” he says.

It’s an ambiguous response, but John feels an inexplicable flood of relief.

“I’ll tell him you came in,” Strider says.

“Yeah, tell him to call me. Or text me, or message me online or whatever. Anything.”

Strider’s hand moves from his shoulder to his back as he walks forward. John finds his touch oddly comforting. It’s a weird combination of fraternal and paternal.

Then the hand is gone, and John hears the door start to close. He whirls around. “He’ll be okay,” he says. “Right?”

Strider looks at him. “Yeah,” he says. “He’ll be okay.”

John backs away, reassured. Strider shuts the door, and John is left on the front steps, suddenly feeling very alone.


	10. Hope

Dave doesn’t come back to school that week, or the week after. John figures he’s just recovering, but he would like to get a text or something. A chat message. Hell, even a like on a Facebook status – anything to break the waiting spell. The radio silence seems sadder this time.

When he gets the word that Dave Strider is dead, he is strangely unmoved.

The kid apparently jumped off his roof. Took a nosedive onto concrete and dry earth. John wants to be surprised, but somehow, he isn’t. The elder Strider hardly wastes any time in taking off back to Texas.

John never sees him again.

It is as though Dave Strider never existed at all, as though he was just a hallucination, conjured up from the same infinity that dragged him down.


	11. Meridian

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's all going to be okay.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone who read this! Hope you enjoyed it, despite the weird and the crazy and the sad and the fact that I mostly hammered it out at 3am. Anyhow, this is the final chapter. Thanks for reading!

John Egbert wakes up.

“Fucking _shit!”_ he says.

“Yeah, no kidding,” says a familiar voice. “How’d you fuck up this time?”

John rubs his head and looks over to his right. He does a double take at the person crouching beside him. “What – _Dave?”_

“Not yours,” Dave says.

John looks closer, and realizes that it’s true - something is different about him. He’s got some stubble, for one thing; it makes him look disconcertingly like his brother. And his eyes are solid white, which is kinda weird, but okay. More than that, though, he looks older, taller, stronger – somehow, he’s not fourteen anymore.

“Where are my shoes?” John says, without thinking.

Dave raises an eyebrow. “Really? You end up here, and the first thing you want to know is why you’re barefoot? Do better, Egbert.”

John glances around. It looks like they’re… on a dune, somewhere near an ocean? Whatever. “Am I dreaming?”

“Kind of," says Dave. "You’re actually dead.”

“Huh?” He's so nonchalant that it takes a moment for John to register the words. Then his hand flashes up to touch his forehead again, and he remembers. “Oh, god. I’m such an idiot," he mutters. "Someone ran me over.”

 “Ha, is that what happened?” Dave smiles. “Man, that’s so mundane. I almost feel bad.”

“So I'm a ghost," John says. He's not totally sure how he feels about that. "Are you a ghost, too?”

“Yep,” Dave says cheerfully. “Duh. Lots of ghosts around here. Lots of ghosts of the same people, from all the doomed timelines. There’s a massive abundance of me running around.” He gives John’s arm a friendly nudge. “And now there’s one more of you! Welcome to the club, dude.”

“You died when we were fourteen,” John bursts out.

Dave scratches his head. “Wow, really? Didn’t get far then, did we? But you don’t look fourteen – shit, did you outlast me? Son of a bitch…”

“What are you talking about?” John says. “You jumped off your roof.”

Dave blinks. “Oh. Shit. Did you… you didn’t play the game?”

“Game?”

“Sburb, dude!” Dave says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “The thing that ended the world and jacked us all across the universe onto separate planets and threw us in with aliens and shit? That game? Ringin’ no bells? Seriously?”

“Oh, Sburb!” says John. “No, we had Sburb, it’s just – um. Is that what it was supposed to do?”

“End the world? Sure, man. I died in that god damn game. I’ll tell you about it later, but yeah, among other things, it ended the world.”

“Oh,” says John. “Well, none of that happened, for us. There was no Sburb.” He thinks for a moment. “Well, there was. Kind of. But it was a mistake or something?”

“A mistake?”

John shrugs. “I still don’t know.”

Dave frowns at his hands for a moment before his face relaxes in comprehension. “Ohhh. Yeah, I think I get it.”

“You do?”

“Sure. The game was a mistake, and your Earth didn’t end – so that means it screwed up and the game didn’t complete in your universe, or showed up when it wasn’t supposed to?”

John blinks. “I… guess?”

“Yeah, I could see that happening,” says Dave. He seems pretty okay with it. “That’s a new one – stupid fucking timelines. But if it messed up like that, maybe it would be possible for your Dave to connect with it by a fluke… oh, yeah, especially since we have the most natural understanding of time and realities and dimensions and shit. So the game singled him out, it fucked with him, and eventually he got so fucked up he took a long walk off a shitty roof. Long story short. Right?”

John stares at him. Dave shrugs defensively. “What? It’s not exactly hard to put it together, dude.”

John regains his composure. “Yeah – well, no. I guess not, if you know more than I do. It's not that I don't believe you, I guess that's all possible. It’s just kind of an offhand way to describe something so, uh, traumatic.”

“Probably. You get used to it when you meet a ton of versions of yourself who have died in literally every possible way.”

“It was bad,” John admits. “The game never released or anything, but, someone sent it to you, after you moved to Washington.” He pauses. “Some girl named Rose?”

Dave bites the inside of his cheek. “Yeah, it figures Rose would do that.”

“Who was she?”

“Who, Rose? Oh, she’s probably the biggest moron in all of paradox space. Stone-cold idiot. I’m talking stupidity in spades from that girl. Don’t go near her.”

“Well, your irony isn’t any better,” says John. “Anyway, she sent you the game. And it kinda flipped out and screwed up your house. And tried to kill you, or something.”

“Gross.”

“Yeah, I don’t know, your bro tried to explain it to me but I didn’t really get it. He told me I’d understand it ‘someday.’” He twists his fingers together. “I guess someday is now?”

Dave shrugs. “Hell, you’ve got eons of free time to speculate. You could probably assemble enough bullshit to make some plausible theory, especially since you can talk to people from the doomed timelines now. Might make it easier.”

A thought nudges at the back of John’s mind. “Um.”

Dave looks at him. “Huh?”

John draws his knees up to his chest, not entirely sure how to word it. “I was just wondering,” he says awkwardly. “If there are a lot of Dave ghosts around… do you think I’d be able to find the Dave from my timeline?”

Dave adjusts his shades, frowning. “Man… I don’t know. I mean, I guess you could, if you looked hard enough.” He gives John a sympathetic look. “Space just goes on for a long-ass time, dog. Everyone from every dead-end timeline is floating around out here somewhere. It’s not like you’re short on time, but there’s literally an infinity of ghosts you could go through.”

John slumps. “Oh.”

“What?”

John sighs and rubs his jaw. “I don’t know. It’s just that, he died two years ago, and I, uh… well, I never got to say anything to him before that. Like, between the game bullshit and him dying, he never contacted me, so…”

He doesn’t finish the sentence, but Dave lets out a morose sigh. “Wow, that is depressing. Hey, Rose, isn’t that depressing as shit?”

“It’s not very nice,” agrees a voice from John’s opposite side.

He twists around to see a pale girl with bobbed blonde hair, leaning against a pillar with a book under her arm, smiling faintly at him with the same white eyes.

“You’re Rose?” he says.

“The one and only,” she says. “Except, you know, not.”

“There’s a lot of people around here you won’t know,” Dave says. “Since you never played the game. But a lot of them will know you. Might throw you off a bit.”

“I think I can deal,” John says.

Dave looks at Rose. “Dude, I’ve never met his Dave. At least I don’t think I have. Have you?”

“Not that I remember,” says Rose. “Although they tend to blur together.”

John twists his fingers, cautious. “Can you… help?” he asks.

Rose smiles slightly. “I suppose it’s worth a try. It can’t be that difficult, for something as simple as this... especially with the numbers we’ve got.”

“Fuck, man, are you kidding? It would be hardly any effort at all. Even if they all act like assholes most of the time, they'd do something like this.”

“No offense,” says John, “but what the hell are you guys talking about?”

*

“This way.”

“This way.”

It’s a murmur of voices, soft for the sheer number of people spread out on the beach. John is surprised the bubble doesn’t pop.

“This w-way.”

“You can, uh, go…”

“Ugh, Tav, he already knows, leave him alone.”

 “Hey, blue kid!”

“Hey!”

"I dreamed about you!"

“Egbert, you dumb piece of shit, you couldn’t even survive long enough to play the game?”

“Shut up, KK, who cares?”

It’s a bit overwhelming. Most of them are weird-looking aliens that he’s never seen before, although it does seem like there’s an excess of Daves. John even glimpses his own face a few times, caught in various stages of puberty. It’s all very surreal.

Hands touch him occasionally, guiding him through the crowd. Gentle fingertips and ragged palms. Vitriol and care, indifference and happiness, it’s all there, and he doesn’t understand any of it because he knows hardly any of these people, but somehow it lifts his spirits as he walks along the tideline.

The crowd is spread out, most of them engaged in conversations with each other, but people still step aside for him. He moves forward, his heart jumping at every upturned face.

Then a jewelry-draped alien girl draws aside, and there he is.

Stuck at fourteen, he’s a little shorter than John now, but he’s aged in his own way. His ease looks just a little more genuine, he looks more laid-back and older in some manner that John can’t quite put his finger on, even though he’s got the same shades – would John have expected anything else? – and the same hair, and the same slouched posture.

John stares. He can’t stop staring. It’s just been so long since he’s seen him, this kid he only knew for about six weeks when he was fourteen. His best friend, who left without a word, who stayed the same while John kept going.

The crowd mills around them, refugees from a broken timeline.

Dave Strider looks up, meets his eyes, and smiles.

 

 

~fin


End file.
